5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Outstanding interview. Many thanks for posting it. I sent it on to the person we train with (esp. regarding the hallway discussion) and several others. We (wife and I) are 1911 kind of people (in .45 of course) so we loved that part.

I forwarded the article to my SEAL buddy J.B., to remind him of all the fun he missed when he left the Corps and went over to the dark side (at least as far as the designer sunglasses are concered).

Not that he's missed all that much, with a deployment to Afganistan and three to Iraq, and a tin knee he won in 2nd Fallujah.

Actually, they know people in common, as the SEALs and Recon all go to the same schools. The Marine Corps set up all the original combat arms training for the SEALs, which is why their primary bases are on Corps property, and the UDT folks trained Marine Recon in the frogman part. They both go to Benning together for jump school.

At the NCO club in Da Nang, the Recon and SEALS all had a common corner away from the door, a secret club with little yellow cards for anyone who'd been more than 20 klicks inside North Vietnam, and the guys they all admired most were the harbor swimmers.

The locals used to put swimmers in various harbors along the coast, and the buggers would attach limpet mines to shipping.

The harbor swimmers would paddle around all night with kabars or fairbains and stick badguys, then slap a resque pack on them and let them float ashore. Great advertising when the fisherman found them in their nets.

There were some Australian swimmers working with them too, seriously scary gents, but I don't remember what branch of the service they were from.

Life has been dull these last few decades. With that line about "interesting times", I guess I could never be a happy Chinese.